How the Great Depression Altered US Foreign Policy

As Americans suffered through the Great Depression of the 1930s, the financial crisis influenced U.S. foreign policy in ways that pulled the nation even deeper into a period of isolationism. While the exact causes of the Great Depression are debated to this day, the initial factor was World War I. The bloody conflict shocked the global financial system and altered the worldwide balance of political and economic power. The nations involved in World War I had been forced to suspend their use of the gold standard, long the determining factor in setting international currency exchange rates, in order to recover from their staggering war costs. Attempts by the U.S., Japan, and the European nations to re-instate the gold standard during the early 1920s left their economies without the flexibility they would be needed to cope with the financial hard times that would come in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Along with the great U.S. stock market crash of 1929, economic difficulties in Great Britain, France, and Germany coincided to create a global â€Å"perfect storm† of financial crises. Attempts by those nations and Japan to hold on to the gold standard only worked to fuel the storm and hasten the onset of a global depression. Depression Goes Global With no coordinated international system of dealing with a worldwide depression in place, the governments and financial institutions of the individual nations turned inward. Great Britain, unable to continue in its long-held role as the mainstay and chief ​money lender of the international financial system, became the first nation to permanently abandon the gold standard in 1931. Preoccupied with its own Great Depression, the United States was unable to step in for Great Britain as the world’s â€Å"creditor of last resort,† and permanently dropped the gold standard in 1933. Determined to resolve the global depression, leaders of the world’s largest economies convened the London Economic Conference of 1933. Unfortunately, no major agreements came out of the event and the great global depression persisted for the rest of the 1930s. Depression Leads to Isolationism In struggling with its own Great Depression, the United States sank its foreign policy even deeper into post-World War I stance of isolationism. As if the Great Depression was not enough, a series of world events that would result in World War II added to Americans’ desire for isolation. Japan seized most of China in 1931. At the same time, Germany was expanding its influence in Central and Eastern Europe, Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. The United States, however, chose not to oppose any of these conquests. To a large degree, Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt were constrained from reacting to international events, no matter how potentially dangerous, by the demands of the public to deal exclusively with domestic policy, primarily bringing an end to the Great Depression. Having witnessed the horrors of World War I, Hoover, like most Americans, hoped to never see the United States involved in another world war. Between his election November 1928 and his inauguration in March 1929, he traveled to the nations of Latin America hoping to win their trust by promising that the U.S. would always honor their rights as independent nations. Indeed, in 1930, Hoover announced that his administration’s foreign policy would recognize the legitimacy  of the governments of all Latin American countries, even those whose governments did not conform to American ideals of democracy. Hoover’s policy was a reversal of President Theodore Roosevelt’s policy of using force if necessary to influence the actions of Latin American governments. Having withdrawn American troops from Nicaragua and Haiti, Hoover proceeded to avoid U.S. intervention in some 50 Latin American revolutions, many of which resulted in the establishment of anti-American governments. As a result, America’s diplomatic relations with the Latin American warmed during the Hoover presidency. Under the 1933 Good Neighbor Policy of President Franklin Roosevelt, the United States reduced its military presence in Central and South America. The move greatly improved U.S. relations with Latin America, while making more money available for depression-fighting initiatives at home. Indeed, throughout the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, the demand to rebuild the American economy and end rampant unemployment forced U.S. foreign policy onto the backmost burner †¦ at least for a while. The Fascist Effect While the mid-1930s saw the rise conquest of militaristic regimes in Germany, Japan, and Italy, the United States remained entrenched in isolation from foreign affairs as the federal government struggled with the Great Depression. Between 1935 and 1939, the U.S. Congress, over the objections of President Roosevelt, enacted a series of Neutrality Acts specifically intended to prevent the United States from taking any role of any nature in potential foreign wars. The lack of any significant U.S. response to the invasion of China by Japan in 1937 or the forced occupation of Czechoslovakia by Germany in 1938 encouraged the governments of Germany and Japan to expand the scope of their military conquests. Still, many U.S. leaders continued to believe the need to attend to its own domestic policy, mainly in the form of ending the Great Depression, justified a continued policy of isolationism. Other leaders, including President Roosevelt, believed that U.S. non-intervention simple allowed the theaters of war to grow ever-closer to America. As late as 1940, however, keeping the U.S. out of foreign wars had widespread support from the American people, including high-profile celebrities like record-setting aviator Charles Lindbergh. With Lindbergh as its chairman, the 800,000-member-strong America First Committee lobbied Congress to oppose President Roosevelt’s attempts to provide war materials to England, France, the Soviet Union, and the other nations fighting the spread of fascism. When France finally fell to Germany in the summer of 1940, the U.S. government slowly started increasing its participation in the war against fascism. The Lend-Lease Act of 1941, initiated by President Roosevelt, allowed the president to transfer, at no cost, arms and other war materials to any â€Å"government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.† Of course, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1942, thrust the United States fully into World War II and ended any pretense of American isolationism. Realizing that the nation’s isolationism had to some degree contributed to the horrors of World War II, U.S. policymakers once again began to emphasize the importance of foreign policy as a tool in preventing future global conflicts. Ironically, it was the positive economic impact of America’s participation in World War II, which had been long-delayed in part by the Great Depression that at last pulled the nation out of its longest economic nightmare.

The Evolutionary Social Theories ( Teggart ) Essay

*****In early anthropology, the mode of operation was to study the beliefs and practices of different cultures then observe the relations they had with each other. While studying culture, anthropologists observed many similarities in the traits and the material culture among different societies. As said by the founder of the ASW (Anthropological Society of Washington) in 1895: â€Å"Even among peoples geographically far apart, often being different forms of mankind, we find phrases, arts, industry, social styles and customs, folk-tales, beliefs and Gods, and even literatures very much alike† (O. T. Mason, 1895a: 14). Societies or cultures were consequently classed according to their ‘advancement’ these classes came to be interpreted as stages in the evolution civilization. Societies would have evolved from a simple primitive lifestyle to a barbaric one and finally to modern society. This is now known as the evolutionary social theories (Teggart, 1949; Watson, 1953 ; Burrow, 1968; Harris, 1968; Meek, 1976; Bowler, 1983). *****Civilisation has been described as going through stages by philosophers as far back as millennia ago. A. Comte, H. Spencer, K. Marx, L. H. Morgan, and E. B. Tylor, took to describing civilisation as evolving. They were joined in this by many scholars of history. For these theories to works some assumptions were made. The first was that basic human nature is the same throughout. That regardless of which path societies take they were heading in the same

Film and Literature Essay Example For Students

Film and Literature Essay RashomonIn the short story Rashomon by Akutagawa Ryunosuke the theme of choosing between life and death and right from wrong has been put to the test over and over through out the depths of time. With this knowledge it can clearly be stated that one can not perform an evil without thinking about one being done in return to them. In Rashomon the servant was left with a valiant decision, one in which he felt very uncomfortable and at the same time believed incapable of making. After some brief analysis of his situation he clearly realized he needed to make a decision between feast or fam-ine, he chose the former. Humans when faced with making critical choices such as one that involves there own life over the life of an-other and at the same time put under pressure about making those choices tend to save themselves. This was exactly the choice the ser-vant made. This of course without saying is the natural choice, but these decisions are also the ones that separate the heroes or icons from ordinary people. Decisions such as whether to fight for your country even though you dont agree with the reason for it, or to stand up for your religion even though you will be persecuted. The servant could have opted not to rob the old women and think of an-other way of surviving, but that would have been the more !difficult of the two decisions. When he climbed up that latter he was full of fear but that fear soon dispersed when he saw an old women, some-one who was weaker than him. The servant saw the old women pulling hair out of the head of corpses he still at this point had com-passion for those dead people and his human side arose:With every hair she plucked, the mans fear subsided. But, at the same time, he began to feel an intense hatred for this old women. To put it more accurately, a growing aversion to all manner of evil slowly welled up inside of him. If at this moment he were to weigh the merits of stealing or starving to death, as he had done under the gate, he would have chosen death without any hesitation.What made the servant change from what the author reveals about his character that he was an adequate servant to his master to a crazed man. The fact is all humans have sinned and when tempted with the opportunity it can sometimes seem very difficult to turn down especially with mundane decisions. Although, it angered him that the old women was taking hair off corpses heads and was going to use them to make a wig and sell it for food or money it didnt oc-cur to him that it would have bee no different if it were him taking the hair off the heads of those corpses because he was robbing her. At that moment he was so engulfed with evil that only the thought of survival raced through his mind. When flushed with a decision that can alter your life for the better you will more than likely make that choice which will enhance your life without the consideration of others. This was the exact choice that both the servant and the old women made. The servant took advantage a situation because he would have otherwise starved to death. The next time he might be the one who will be taken ad-vantage from by someone stronger than him.